Hi guys, welcome back to the TOEFL Course. Today, I want to talk about how to scan for information.
You may already be familiar with scanning in your own language, but it can be tricky when doing it in English. So, let’s talk about a way, a method of scanning, that will make it faster for you to find information. So, scanning is all about keywords. First, look at the question.
Think to yourself. What words do you need to find? So you’re going to scan the text looking, looking, looking, looking, and you’re going to be thinking about keywords. So you’re going to look for those keywords in the text. Or synonyms of those keywords. This is very important.
Let’s say for example, you’re looking for something about Insects. And, you look through the text and you only look for words that start with I-N-S-E. If you’re only thinking about these letters then you might miss something that says bugs and bugs are insects. These are mostly synonymous.
So this sentence about bugs, whatever it says in the text, might actually give the answer about a question about insects. So you need to look for keywords or synonyms. Now, let’s say I have a word like insects, and I look through the text and I read every single word. This is going to waste a lot of time and you may not be able to finish answering all the questions.
So, how can I avoid reading everything, reading full sentences? You’re going to go through multiple times and just look for those keywords and synonyms. By going through once quickly. And then again quickly.
I’ll show you this in a moment. After you find the synonym or keyword, then you read the sentences around that keyword or synonym. So this is the basic idea of scanning. What keywords do you need, find them, read the sentences. So here’s a question, this is about sexual reproduction in clonal plants.
So, these are the key words here, and the text is mostly about clonal plants. So, these key words might not be so easy to find. I’m going to choose these ones. I am looking for something about sexual reproduction. Now, in my paragraph, there is a lot of information. This one’s relatively short actually.
So this is very important for the reading section in particular. You will be scanning quite often for detail questions, for except questions, inference questions, categorization, many question types. And we’ll talk more about these in other lessons. But scanning just to find information quickly is one of the most important TOEFL reading skills.
So practice going through the text by scanning and just finding keywords, as I talked about.